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// Chapter I: Genitive 
// Story: Subjunctive 
// by Integral Archer 
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	If I am to give an accurate recounting of my experiences, it will first be necessary to give in succinctness the minor details of my early life in order to provide the necessary context for my adult intellection and to, hopefully, explain the actions I took in the future, which, perhaps, may come across as rash and unwarranted to some.

I came from an egg, as did all my brothers and sisters. I had broken free of my shell long before my only immediate brother. It was my dam’s first mating season, and she had produced only two eggs that year—me and a lost soul. Two hours after my hatching, as I was rolling around in the grass, full of life, energy, and glee, my dam saw her other infant frantically struggling in vain to crack the shell. She, with that nervousness peculiar to females during their first mating season, made a small incision with her hoof in the shell, allowing my immediate brother to bypass his first trial. He emerged into the world with an unsound mind and with limbs that were loose and weak. Two days later, he died. My dam was heartbroken, but even she knew that the death was not unwarranted, for she had not allowed my immediate brother to learn the crucial lesson of life’s impediments and struggles in his first hours of existence, thus allowing him to be instilled with a natal complacency. Nature was unsympathetic, unyielding, and my dam soon came to realize that his early death was the most merciful one that it could have granted him.

I was shocked, like all my other brothers and sisters, when I was old enough to see where our food came from. I did gasp when I watched the swarm pillage the herd of an unsuspecting species. The more the beasts ran and cried, the more merciless the swarm became. I lost a few nights of sleep, as was common, but I, like all my brothers and sisters, quickly came to accept the fact that this was our way of life, that this was—we were—a force of nature, and it was no less wrong than the blue jay stealing the eggs of its lesser avian neighbors.

We had a brother king, then, and I always looked to him with awe, more so than any of my brothers and sisters did. His messages to us were clear and concise but always profound and informative. I wanted to be just like him. Whenever I asked my dam who my sire had been, she invariably refused to tell me, but I had always liked to think that it was he.

In my juvenile years, I was loud, energetic, and competitive. I was the first to organize the recreational contact sports with the other males when the teachers had released us from our early-age educational activities. I bit, kicked, and cried with delight or sorrow depending on whether I had won or lost. But I never cheated, unlike a good number of the males in my generation, and though I despised losing, I hung my head in shame when it happened and took it as it was deserved. When I caught others cheating, there were no inquiries from me, nor did I allow them to defend themselves. I attacked them mercilessly until they had either run away or admitted to their unscrupulousness and begged forgiveness from me. These were good years, when I was feared and respected by my brothers and sisters of my generation.

My adolescent years were marked with periods of doubt and unhappiness, wherein anxiety accompanied each thought, a feeling of weakness with each action. Those years are the ones when our roles in life start to define themselves uniquely, and my juvenile mind was not pleased when it saw the direction that my body was starting to lean toward. I saw the other males in my generation grow big, muscular, and thick, while my body seemed to be a bit slower in its growth into maturation, and I found it harder and more taxing to keep up with the contact sports that I had once enjoyed so much. I never did grow to their size, and I ended up being one of the smallest males. Half the females were larger than I was. Thankfully, my reputation of anger and violence from when I was a juvenile lingered for a little while longer, so I was not cheated or taken advantage of during those years. But if a large male—or female—had wanted to seek retribution for my distribution of justice from earlier years, I would not have been able to defend myself.

It was during my first mating season that the discrepancy between me and my brothers became clear to me fully. Needless to say, it had not gone as I had hoped. I shied away from my brothers when I heard them brag, in the loudest voices they could muster, about their mates—ten, fifteen, twenty in total, each one bigger and stronger than the last. And I was afraid to speak of my four mates: one of them had died shortly after our first mating season for inexplicable reasons; another one had been lost to me by the entreaties and solicitations of a larger male during my second mating season, and the two that remained looked upon me with those judgmental stares and cold indifference peculiar to females, and they never failed to treat me with that unwelcoming and uncomfortable disposition which, as our teachers had said, was supposed to relent somewhat during mating season, but this never seemed to happen for them. My successive mating years, which I was supposed to look forward to, like all the others, with a healthy blend of excitement and nervousness, only brought me the feeling of dread and bore me no comfort.

It was at this moment precisely that I noticed a massive change in my interests. No more interest in contact sports, no more interest in comparing mates—my interests moved from all of those one considers as male activities and toward what, at the time, I thought to be the oddest passion imaginable.


*


Linguistics: the study of the sounds used by sentient and intelligent species to convey complex ideas.

The stronger males become the hunters and the studs; the smaller and weaker ones become the scientists and artists.

Our linguists, at the time, were few and mostly female. Though I did not admit it to myself then, these facts contributed in no small degree to my ultimate choice of study: To the former factor, I only now realize that my choice of linguistics out of all the sciences was spurred by an unadmitted and subconscious desire to obtain a skill I could truly call my own. To the latter factor, the reader does not need me to elaborate as to the nature of its enticement.

As I sit writing this now, while the memories of my youth come back to me in turn, a smile comes to my face as I feel the past innocent, naive, but none the less heartfelt notions that filled my mind then, so innocuous in themselves, so devastating in their long-lasting impressions. Oh, the trivialities that incur august weight by ultimately directing one to his life’s lofty purpose!

But, for the first few months, after starting formal lessons, I found it less than intriguing. A month into my studies, I was not even able to tell myself why I continued to pursue it. When I thought about the concept of the science, it spoke to me—if the pun is to be forgiven—of something bigger than I, something wider than I could ever be: primordial sounds, useless in themselves, given meaning by sentience and intelligence, joined inseparably in the mind by the image of a systematic stringing together of symbols called a writing system, its range of capable expressions infinite. What else in the world but language can be said to encompass not only the entire universe as it is and what it may become but also to encompass the irreal and the counterfactual, a separate universe infinitely large and growing still, but none the less describable for it?

I knew this then. So how could I still have found the lessons boring and unstimulating? Why did I always find myself counting the hours until they were over? I didn’t know the answer then, but I know now: only the most archaic and inefficient teaching methods, delivered by apathetic and mechanical teachers, can manage to destroy the appeal of this science, so grand in intent and scope as it is.

But there was one day that changed all that, a day that held a lesson that I will remember for the rest of my life, a lesson that gave me a stroke of pure inspiration and, in an instant, allowed me to realize exactly who I was, what my purpose was, and what I was destined to do:

We were learning about the concept of a lingua franca, or the notion that, in the world, there always existed one language that is considered to be the default one for communication if the two parties did not share a mother tongue—a “universal language,” in a sense.

“May I teach you a few of the letters, words, and important phrases of the lingua franca in our age, which will no doubt prove useful to you over the course of your lifetimes,” the teacher told us. She began to speak, and all the students recoiled and hissed reflexively at the sounds that came out of her mouth. They were spoken at such a low frequency and the words sounded so guttural that we were immediately put off by their ugliness. This was a language? How could any creature stand to make that sound for an extended period of time? We tried dropping our own shrills to that almost impossibly low frequency, resulting in quite a few of us coughing violently.

“It takes practice to do it comfortably and well,” the teacher shrilled, with a laugh. Then, she showed us the characters that represented such foul sounds. There were twenty-six of them, and I couldn’t help but notice that many of them were redundant, indistinctive, and illogical. The pupils attempted to speak each one aloud as the teacher gestured toward them, and the coughing and hacking that ensued would not have been matched had the students all suddenly been afflicted by a deadly virus.

“They aren’t hard to remember,” the teacher went on, “for each one loosely corresponds to one of our letters.” She went over them, made the sounds again, and explained which of our sounds corresponded to those of the letters of the lingua franca. Virtually none of them sounded like the letters they were supposed to correspond to, and to this day, I still don’t understand how our lexicographers of old had decided how our letters, meant to be spoken at a frequency higher than most animals could hear, corresponded to the twenty-six we then saw before us, meant to be spoken in such low, rumbling groans capable of being heard only over very short distances. But, as my teacher had remarked: “Who are we to question the grammarians?”

The lesson had concluded at this point, but there were still quite a few hours until it was time to eat, and we had nowhere to go. So, perhaps for her own amusement, the teacher wrote out an assortment of the letters for all to see, and told the students: “This phrase is the most important of them all. This phrase tells the recipient of your words your formal moniker, by which you are to be addressed.” She then told us to append to the end of the phrase our names—but with them written in the letters of their unintuitive lingua franca counterparts. We were then supposed to say the phrase, along with our butchered names, in front of the rest of our brothers and sisters.

It had taken us a good twenty minutes to figure out what our names would look like, and the teacher had given us no time to work on their pronunciations.

The first student that was called coughed and wheezed as he tried to form the sounds in that low frequency, and it was clear to me from his first attempts that the point of this exercise was for us to take pleasure at the sight and sound of our brothers and sisters humiliating themselves in front of a group—a popular spectacle of entertainment, but one that I thought did not exemplify our prided virtue of solidarity.

When he was done, he asked a question which I had been intending to ask when my turn came: he asked what his name meant in the language in that particular context. “Nothing!” the teacher chortled. “If you decide to study the lingua franca, you’ll find that many of the words in our language do not exist in it—so your name is meaningless! If your name does not have an equivalent word, it will sound ridiculous when pronounced phonetically. And I advise that you not ask me to translate them literally lest you subject yourself to additional ridicule.” She laughed again.

I scratched out and rewrote the lingua franca letters of my name several times. As I heard the others attempt to make themselves sound dignified, and as I heard those attempts being responded to only with derisive laughter, I felt my heart beat faster, and my teeth chattered as I wrote it out a final time. I had little time to work on the pronunciation. I rotated my head around the letters, mouthing them to myself, trying to get them perfect, trying to twist my vocal cords to vibrate at such a low frequency—

“Brother!” My thoughts were interrupted by the words of the teacher. I almost took to my wings in fright. I looked to the teacher. She was gesturing toward me. “Let us hear!”

There was nothing I could do now. I had to commit to a pronunciation. I took a deep breath, looked at my scribblings, and choked out: “My . . .”

Instantly, I was paralyzed by the laughter of my brothers and sisters. I was hesitant to go on, but the imperious stare of the teacher left me no choice. I tried to ignore the pained, screeching sounds that I heard coming from my own mouth: “. . . name . . . is . . .”

I stopped as I looked at the letters that were supposed to represent my name. They looked awkward, unnatural, and I didn’t want to say them.

“My name is . . .” the teacher pushed.

“Errenax,” I blurted.

My brothers and sisters were merciless in their laughter.

But I didn’t hear them; the only sound that lingered in my head was the one I had just said. It was the first in the string of sounds I had just made that didn’t sound repulsive to me. It sounded good, beautiful, and I wanted to hear it again. “My . . . name . . . is—Errenax,” I said a second time. I had spoken steadily and had paced myself. My voice had still sounded strangled, but I hadn’t paused or coughed, and I hadn’t stopped myself in mid-sentence. I stood up straight and puffed out my chest, feeling very satisfied with myself, and the roars from my brothers and sisters bounced off the solid exoskeleton that I could now call my vocal aptitude.

The teacher looked at me with an odd grin. “Very good,” she said, and we all went quiet, for it was in that booming voice of hers, which made those strange sounds, and we turned to her, for we did not understand. “My praises be upon you!” she clarified, once we had gone silent.


*


“My . . . name . . . is . . . Errenax,” I grunted to myself as we dispersed after the lesson, my voice turning the heads of a few of my brothers and sisters in close proximity.

No other thoughts would occupy my consciousness for a good time to come. My name represented with those sounds, unlike my brothers’ and sisters’, rolled off my tongue with ease. It felt good to say, and it sounded good to listen to. It was a struggle to pronounce the first three words, and I coughed painfully through them, but it was worth it when I got to say the fourth. For the next few years, I said this phrase under my breath repeatedly, endlessly, even when others were trying to get my attention, and this eventually earned me quite an ignominious reputation among my peers.

But I didn’t care. I had discovered my name during a period in my life when I had felt like an inferior organism, and when I had heard the language, and when I had realized that I loved my name with its sounds, none of my past worries seemed to matter anymore.

As I pursued my study in linguistics—for which, from that point on, my interest was fervidly strong—I also took it upon myself to bring my ease in the lingua franca to the level of my native language, with the object of getting to the point where I couldn’t definitively say with which I was more comfortable.

It is one thing to learn a language descended from or otherwise related to a language you speak, where words are shared, where the grammar is similar, where the sentence structure has that familiar and ubiquitous subject-verb-object construction; it is another thing to go from the language bred and birthed by your culture, a language you’ve never questioned, to a language whose very phonetics differ in nearly every aspect to those of your mother tongue, an alien language from an alien culture, requiring a mindset that you cannot even begin to fathom—ah! It is for this reason why some would say that adults are incapable of acquiring another language; the time and patience it takes to mold your brain, after it has already been long established, in order to allow different and contrary ideas is enough to intimidate even the sturdiest of dispositions.

The first striking thing was that the lingua franca lacked many of the words that I had taken for granted all my life, and it was a challenge in itself coming up with the way to express my ideas in its diverse, yet wholly different, vocabulary. This was exacerbated by the fact that the lingua franca, I observed, had a rather odd fondness for the indicative verb mood and a notable disdain for the subjunctive. The subjunctive was there, to be sure, but it was hardly used, extremely contextual, unwieldy, and the vast majority of speech and writing was in the indicative mood. It was to my great dismay when I realized that, because of this nuance, many of my subtler wishes, fears, and desires could no longer be adequately expressed with the potency with which they could have been conveyed in my mother tongue. I could always translate them literally, but the original elegance was always lost, and no matter how much I studied, I had to eventually accept that there were some of my thoughts, to which I had ascribed so much value, that would never be able to be expressed as they deserved in this beautiful language—but, was it really beautiful? How could anything that would never allow my brothers and sisters to know the things that existed in my mind that were above and beyond the confines of reality be beautiful?

But I couldn’t stop. I wouldn’t let myself. Maturity had not brought to me the body to help my brothers and sisters, so I had to find another way. If not intellectually useful, what other use could I be to them? Why should they care for me or consider me worthy of a passing glance? They didn’t appreciate it now, to be sure, but that was only because I hadn’t shown my skill’s worth to them yet.

Through mutterings that no doubt erroneously convinced others that I had become ill, I first tried to perfect my pronunciation of that holy phrase, the collection of sounds that had, in an instant, shown me my goal and had somehow instilled the sense of purpose in my mind. “My name . . . is—Errenax,” I would wheeze audibly to myself at any given opportunity, heedless of the spiteful shrills that would fill my ears from every direction, from every brother in the immediate vicinity, and from every sister far enough away and who had been doing something of so little importance that she could afford to cease her activities to share in a laugh at my expense.

But I came to be able to say the phrase with as much comfort as breathing. And when that no longer proved to be a challenge, I brought the stream of constant verb conjugations in my head to my mouth in the holy phrase’s stead. When we were resting from a raid, it was not uncommon for my brothers and sisters to hear me mumble: “First person . . . plural . . . present . . . active . . . indicative . . . of be—are.” When night fell and we returned to our domiciles, when they heard, in the rustling darkness, a creature groaning, as if with the tones of pain: “Third person . . . singular . . . pluperfect . . . active . . . indicative . . . of go—had gone,” they knew that it was I, lurking somewhere in the shadows.

But in my head, a voice constantly repeated a different phrase, as in a fever, surrounding me and my thoughts with its constant assurance, droning: “Present subjunctive of be . . . be, be, be, be, be, be, all persons, all numbers.”

All persons, all numbers, the subjunctive is uniform within a tense in this language. In the subjunctive, one person is indistinguishable from the next.

But of course! That made sense! After all, did not our race, with our solidarity and our language’s vital subjunctive, render this already self-evident? 

It was this consistency in the lingua franca’s subjunctive which provided the link between me and it, and it was this fact that convinced me that I was doing the right thing in learning it.

And, slowly, the dissent of my more unoriginal brothers and sisters became even more irrelevant in my eyes. They would, as they always did, point at me as I flew by and would bellow with the intent to mock, in voices that were nearly incomprehensible and with intonations that did a great disservice to the language: “My . . . name . . . is . . . Errenax!” And they would proceed to laugh, as if that phrase and my utterance of it were some sort of badge of shame to be worn. But I would always be laughing the loudest, in spirit, with the voice in my head when it wasn’t conjugating verbs, laughing at them and their futile attempts to paint as dirty that which was bright—my ability, my name, and my resolve. On the days when I was feeling particularly good or proud of myself, I would fly right up to them with a patronizing and dismissive smile, and would tell them: “Brothers and sisters! The grammatical integrity of your attempt at ridicule is lacking! You use the first person singular possessive adjective when the situation warrants the second person! ‘Your name is Errenax,’ is what is required of you to say!” They would usually exchange looks of incredulity before making no attempts to hide their boisterous laughter. I would bid them cursory farewells and would be on my way, my feeling of superiority the foundation of my silence to the jeers that followed me.

With barely any in the swarm who shared my obsession, it’s a wonder how I ever became fluent. But it was as if, one day, a switch flipped in my head, and I found that competing for space in my brain were two lines of thought, completely different and suited for unrelated purposes, which I could activate or deactivate at will depending on the situation. There were now two entities in my brain—one for the subjunctive and the other for the indicative. The irreal and the real floated within me in harmony. And if ever I became annoyed with my brothers and sisters, I could just think in a language that rendered their shrills meaningless.

That was my ability and option, but why should I want to do that? I loved languages just as much as I loved them, just as much as I loved learning, education, students, knowledge, and everything else that you may call academics. Thus, I became a scholar. I eventually got my own class, my own students who called me brother teacher, and I sometimes spoke to them in the lingua franca even if they didn’t understand, such that they would be able to speak to me in the future.

And my colleagues, those adhering to the strict rules of the past, those who took pleasure at the sight of yawning students and the perusal of documents whose unvaried, formulaic styles permitted no emotion to be placed in their words—they came to scoff at my lectures and dismiss the style of my writings. My family, who had known me as the eccentric adolescent and student, came to know me as the eccentric adult and professor. But my students, whether they hated me or were enamored with me, came to know me as the grandiloquent and extraordinary lecturer and writer, whose sentences strung on to the sky as adjectives and gerunds piled one on top of the other, who wrote in a style some deemed to be more fitting to romances than to scientific treatises.

Science and romance: two seemingly diametrically opposed entities, united at last within me, united me to my family, and gave me that individual distinction I had subconsciously craved for so long.


*


I don’t remember what I was doing when I heard the call. All I remember was that, when I heard it, it pulled at both parts of my brain. It was a shrill that spoke ardently to both the changeling and the eccentric in my head, and the two parts commanded my body in perfect tandem and made my wings thrust me away from my brothers and sisters and toward a destination of which I knew not the significance. I only knew that it was significant.

It was during that hour of the day when the sun had just disappeared under the waves of the ocean in the west in the ultimate point of sight, still managing to, in its last breaths, shed a few of its most ambitious rays into the atmosphere and causing a twilight called dusk, a deceptive hour, for there is still enough light to see by, by which diurnal animals can operate, but it is a rapidly diminishing light, a light that disappears at a rate slow enough to be unnoticeable but fast enough to overwhelm said animals with complete darkness, leaving them vulnerable and helpless to their innumerable and insidious nocturnal counterparts. I was one of those diurnal animals, and though I was fully aware that the hour was rapidly ceding to the night, and though the shapes in my vision were becoming increasingly blurry and indistinguishable, still my body barreled through the forest with a will that I could barely attribute to anything conscious. And as I carelessly whipped past the branches of the trees and bushes—getting quite a few cuts on my face and body in the process—I felt my wings already spinning as quickly as they were physically able to, aching as they tried to move faster, not content with the impossible velocity they had already managed to make me achieve.

After dodging more pine needles and branches than I could count, I, without warning, felt myself slam headfirst into something warm and soft, and I held onto it instinctively as both I and the mass tumbled through the air—amazingly, hitting no trees in the process—until we landed on the grass and dirt, rolling one on top of the other for quite some distance, flecks of dirt getting caught in the nets of webbing on my neck in the process.

At last, we came to a stop. It took me a few seconds to clear my mind of the confused amalgam of thoughts and to take in what I had hit:

A creature—not just any creature, but a sister! And not just any sister, but one whom I distinctly knew—one who frequently attended my lectures!

She smiled at me as we pulled ourselves to our feet. With the subjunctives of familiarity and amicability, she shrilled, in short: “Accept my apology, brother teacher. If I had only seen your advance!”

I did not reply. I was about to take to my wings again to pursue the shrill that had so captured my attention earlier with its imperativeness, but when I perked up my ears to take my bearings, I could hear nothing. Silence. Just the chirping of crickets.

I looked back to my sister. “It was you!” I shrilled in excitement. “For what purpose am I needed?”

“It was not she who called,” came another shrill from behind me. I turned around and was taken aback by what I saw:

There were four of my kin, hovering in a cluster, looking down on me and my sister. I waited for an explanation, but none came. They all hung in the air, looking at me entreatingly, as if they were expecting me to start. There was something oddly peculiar about some of them which I couldn’t place exactly, but when I felt a gust of air behind me, when I looked and saw my sister with whom I had collided leave my side and take to the air, whereupon promptly contributing her unsettling stare upon me to those of the rest, it came to me in a second:

Two of the faces—now three, as I looked back to her—I knew. They, too, I had seen during my studies or my lectures! I couldn’t see the faces of the other two, but since it was rare for merely six of us to occupy such a large amount of space at one time, I conjectured that there must have been some common purpose that had united me with them, at this strange place, at this unconventional hour. I had been summoned through unorthodox and imperious methods and impressed to carry myself far away into a remote region, which I realized only then I was not familiar with.

There were few reasons why there should be so few of us so far away from the rest of the swarm, and I could only assume that the words that were about to be uttered next were ones that others could not be permitted to hear—or perhaps . . . unable to hear?

It was a stretch, but a full minute had gone by in silence without a single shrill or any method of communication between us. They were looking to me to initiate discourse, and I saw that they were not going to accept my cession of that obligation. But the call I had heard had been so urgent that I couldn’t just walk away. I had to step forward. I had to fly up to their level, look them in the eyes, and, in the lowest frequency I could muster with my vocal cords, I said, in the lingua franca: “Who called me? Why was I called?”

The five of them looked at each other and snickered. I blushed when I heard them laughing at my words. Why, I asked myself, did I feel this apprehension and never before, despite the fact I had spoken many times publicly with ease?

That it was for the reason that these snickers were of a different intent, I answered to myself almost immediately. I wasn’t being ridiculed, I realized; their laughs were those of camaraderie caused by the recounting of an old joke shared only between those who’ve known each other long enough to form bonds unseeable by others—they were laughs of release and mutual euphoria. And I understood that I, for too long, had craved such a feeling, and now that it was being satisfied in unprecedented quantities, I was being overwhelmed with the feeling of elation it gave me.

The group refixed me with their stares. They ceased their vocalizations of humor and relinquished the dominion of the solemn atmosphere of the meeting back to the depths of a silence broken only by the chirps of crickets. One of them, a male, shrilled: “This response, in itself, answers your second inquiry.”

It took me a few seconds to realize what he had meant, but when I had, I opened my eyes so wide with comprehension that I could see in my peripheral vision my irises’ faint glow on my cheek bones. And when I saw a seventh figure shift from behind the tall prairie stalks, a silhouette so large and definitive that I should have seen it immediately, with a mane that reflected the light of the moon in an intense blue-green, my first question was answered.

“My sister queen!” I shrilled, perhaps too excitedly.